Andy Kaufman's Lost Tapes...Found

Most Read

Andy Kaufman did far better—and got away with far more—than he had any right to given how unhinged his shtick was, but for all his success, one mark of distinction always eluded him: a comedy record.

Now, nearly 30 years after his death, he's got it. Andy and His Grandmother—out now on Drag City/Process Media—features, among other things, a post-coital interview, phone calls with fake animals, Andy being thrown out of a movie theater, Andy having a ferocious fight with a cab driver, Andy asking prostitutes out on dates, and so on, swinging all the while disarmingly sweet to shockingly abusive.

The project began after 82 hours of micro-cassettes surfaced from the personal collection of Lynne Margulies, Kaufman's girlfriend at the time of his death in 1984. Between 1977-79, Kaufman and his tape recorder were inseparable, and while the tapes he created were known to very few besides Margulies, friend Bob Zmuda, manager George Shapiro, and the targets of his various pranks, Kaufman had big plans for them.

"Andy loved comedy records like Steve Allen's Funny Fone Calls,and he always had the idea of making a record with these recordings," says Margulies. "He told me about it, and when he was sick he made me promise to get as much as I could out there. It was always in my head that I was always going to try, but I didn't have the faintest idea of how I was going to do it."

After she and Zmuda published Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts—a collection of threatening letters the comedian received—she told her publisher about the tapes, and asked how she might get a label interested. She was introduced to Drag City, and went to meet founder Dan Koretzky at a Starbucks in L.A., carrying a shoebox of Andy's tapes. "We sat and listened to them and he was like, Oh my god," she says.

Drag City took the tapes, digitized them, and called upon Vernon Chatman (Wonder Showzen, Xavier, Final Flesh) to edit the material and create the album. "It was a daunting, giant project, but I couldn't resist," says Chatman. "It was something that seemed impossible to fully succeed at. But I like impossible things. And I think Andy always had an aura of impossible. He worked with the impossible as one of his tools."

Together with editor Rodney Ascher (Room 237), Chatman spent nearly three years completing the epic task of listening to the tapes in their entirety and editing them down to a 47-minute sound collage as Kaufman might have envisioned it.

"There weren't directions on [the recordings themselves], but it was pretty clear during the tapes what he was most enthusiastic about. The weird thing was the parts where he was being the most unlikable—when he's being really aggressive and pushing people to the point where they're upset—I just thought, that is so him. It's such a driving point of what makes him so entertaining."

The album as a whole shows Kaufman mainly as a provocateur, an antagonist, teasing, taunting and baiting others to the point of rage, jealousy, paranoia. In it he provokes various girlfriends to eruptions of fury, leaving one woman pleading he give her the tapes. While Margulies isn't one of the women on the recording, she finds this material to be some of his most intriguing.

"I hadn't met Andy yet when he was doing those recordings," notes Margulies. "So I'm not on there. But I know who is because Andy told me about them. There was that one girl that Andy kept around because she was just so easy to drive crazy. He just loved it. He just strung her along because he was getting such great material."

"I really didn't want it to be a documentary or a biography," says Chatman. "I wanted it to be a piece of entertainment. It's about following his intentions, and his intentions were clearest when he was doing something that he would get excited about. That's really what I thought should go on the album. It's a look into how he operates, the strange shifting line between his life and his entertainment, him being in character or out-of-character."

But is it comedy?

"It's comedy because it's Andy's comedy," says Margulies. "Andy loved to get people riled up. To him that was the funniest thing in the world."